Welcome to Lego Land

After taking the Ethnobotany Field Studies Course this summer I began working with many of the local medicinal and edible plants. Along the way I discovered many wonderful medicines right here on our campus. One of them, Grindelia squarrosa, is short with bright, yellow, sticky flowers. Grindelia, also known, as “Curly Cup Gumweed” is a petit herb mostly considered a roadside weed. It is also a wonderful astringent medicine, traditionally employed as a kind of chewing gum. While Grindelia may be common on the roadsides of the Southwest it is not commonly found away from the roadside where it can be harvested without worry of absorbing toxins emitted by car exhaust. This summer, however, I found just such a place existed up here on campus. Over near the Kroeger and Berndt Hall area where the overlook views a majestic mountain vista and the quaint town of Durango, there was a dense patch of these precious little plants. Twice this summer while foraging through the woods I ran into poison ivy and came down with an itchy rash. I went to the Grindelia patch on campus and harvested a handful of flowers, taking special care to only take what I needed for healing and allow the plants to recover and complete their life cycle. The medicine worked wonderfully and the rash receded in 2-3 days. However, apparently, my efforts to ethically wildcraft the plants was for naught, because, Thursday 11/29/00 one of the busy little landscaping “bobcats” came in and eradicated the whole patch. This is a very upsetting situation and one which arose out of ignorance. Certainly this action was not committed intentionally. The driver of the bobcat most like didn’t understand the significance of the plants that had just been crushed under the powerful machine.

        Many years ago the Mesa where FLC now stands was a beautiful Piñon / Juniper Woodland. This ecosystem had the capacity to provide all the food, medicine, shelter and clothing that the human and wildlife inhabitants ever needed. At some point the forest was taken down and replaced with bare ground, bluegrass and buildings, except for certain places around the perimeter and slopes of the mesa. Recently FLC undertook a huge physical and financial endeavor to install landscaping to beautify the campus. This was/is an opportunity to undo what was done in the past and replant the Piñon / Juniper Woodland that originally stood here. This is the natural ecosystem of our Mesa and is both aesthetically pleasing and functional to both human and wildlife. Instead we are installing conventional landscaping that resembles “anywhere USA”, a veritable “Lego Land”, landscape suburb, clean and safe. Of course it should be mentioned that we did get our token native plant area. However, this weak effort is insufficient to make up for the tons of Kentucky Blue Grass, which consumes more resources than a small African Village by requiring watering and feeding that the native grass species would not require.

It does not appear that the administration has really thought through the FLC landscape project very thoroughly. This is apparent by the lack of attention given to water and resource conservation through Xeriscaping and native plant propagation. It should be pointed out that all summer long the good green lawn was watered during the middle of the day, at exactly noon, allowing gallons of water to be needlessly wasted into the atmosphere and run off the mesa down the nature trails. Last I checked this is a four-year university equipped with some of the most intelligent caring people in the country. Surely an advisory committee could have been selected to help with the landscape project from its inception. To my knowledge, however, such a committee has only recently been established after the fact. Members of the Biology Department, Campus Ecology, and the Environmental Center are  more than willing to help plan such a project to be as economically and environmentally efficient as possible, yet the ignorance continues. Now the landscaping has come to the point that some very important medicinal “weeds” have been destroyed all in the name of mulch, concrete and bluegrass!

One important consequence that I and others have noticed which may be related to the very unnatural landscaping being installed on campus is the lack of respect and apathy displayed by many of the students. This may represent a kind of disdain for the philosophy that the landscape represents; a reminder of the never-ending suburbs from which many of us have come. The Lego Land landscape has now followed us to school, Fort Lewis College, a place surrounded by natural beauty.

It is discouraging to show up to such a unique place and see students litter the trails around and on campus with candy wrappers and beer cans. Could these actions be a consequence of the landscape we are surrounded by, reminding us of the dirty neighborhoods of cities in which we may have once lived? Are we unconsciously upset by the loss of the natural beauty of the world, which is our birthright?

What I would like to suggest is that we set an example. By utilizing the skills and expertise of faculty and students on campus, we can show incoming students and other universities what could and should be. We can create a landscape that is beautiful and functional. We can integrate our campus to provide the natural surroundings endemic to our bioregion, providing a home for the wildlife that strives to survive amongst a human dominated world. It is also possible to provide enough food and medicine to offset the need for other less sustainable options currently available on campus.

By Neil Logan

FLC Senior Ethnobotany Major